Musings on how presentation design will change the world.

Course Reboot: Visual introduction to the Professional Persona Project

The Professional Communication team has entered the design phase of the course reboot. We’ve developed our structure, written instruction sheets, and designed a course calendar. Currently, we are working on designing our instruction sheets, planning lessons, and creating visuals. I tasked my superstar lab specialist/teaching assistant, Justin Hardy, with designing the instruction sheets for the reboot. I gave him a very loose mock up of a layout, color scheme, and headings. Below is a draft of the instruction sheet Justin created. I love his overall approach, use of supporting shapes, cohesive color scheme, and attention to readability. Something I’d like to work on is streamlining the information and applying some of those ideas I’ve been learning about in Duarte Design’s Slidedocs. Trying to find the balance between a readable, visual document that is also brief enough that students are encouraged to read the content is our challenge. Keeping text large when the instruction sheets are being written by the most verbose woman on the planet (me) is a challenge Justin is taking on head first. One solution we are implementing is creating “splash pages” for our instructions that provide an at a glance view of the activity. The way our learning platform works, student see a basic instruction/description page before they download the actual instructions for an activity. I am confident he will find that balance between readability, succinctness, and visual attractiveness.